Alien Abduction, page 22
“There’s no point in continuing to take her side, Steve,” Milly told him, petulantly. “You’re supposed to be on my side. I’m your girl-friend now. We have to make this work, or we’ll both lose everything.”
“We’ll do what we have to,” Steve said. “We’ll tell our stories when we can, and see where it goes from there.”
“I suppose I ought to be grateful that you don’t want to leap up next Thursday and get it all off your chest,” Milly said. “At least we’ll be together while you’re taking your time—and we’ll have that time, too, to make things better. With any luck, Janine will get bored waiting and stop coming to meetings.”
Steve wasn’t entirely sure, in his own mind, why he needed more time to sort his story out. He couldn’t quite see why he couldn’t just stand up at the next AlAbAn meeting and tell the assembled crowd what his mind had dredged up, with the aid of Sylvia’s prompting, even if they might think that it was a load of unripe bullshit. He was, after all, no stranger to that situation. He was a science teacher in the second best comprehensive in Salisbury, ninety per cent of whose pupils took it for granted that everything teachers said was bullshit, even if they needed to memorize it to get them through their exams. Even so, he really did want to get his story straight. He really did want to get it right, so that he, at least, would know that it wasn’t entirely bullshit.
He hoped, although he certainly wasn’t going to say so to Milly, that Janine would have the patience to stick around until then. He knew that his story wouldn’t help her to understand his betrayal of her trust, let alone encourage her to forgive it, but he still wanted her to hear it, when it was complete. He wanted her to have that unique insight into his dreams, anxieties and hopes, and into the mythical future to which they were both party, even though they were apart.
For all these tangled reasons, when Walter Wainwright called for volunteers at the following Thursday’s AlAbAn meeting, Steve and Milly stayed glued to the seat of the antique Naugahyde settee, feeling the pressure of Janine’ gaze even though she was conspicuously ignoring them, while some doddering old man Steve had never seen before—who introduced himself as “Neville”—got up to tell a tale that he had obviously told before, maybe a dozen times over.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A PASSION FOR PRINT
I haven’t been to group in quite some time and I don’t see any familiar faces—except, of course, for Amelia and Walter. That’s reassuring, in a way, because it gives me reason to hope that I won’t be boring anyone too much—except, of course, for poor Amelia and Walter. I suspect that I’ve been a bit of a bore all my life—my late wife, Jenny, told me often enough that I wasn’t the brightest spark in the fire—but I don’t mean to be and I don’t relish the reputation, so I hope that the younger people here will be able to find something in my story that’s a little bit interesting, even though it isn’t nearly as melodramatic as some of the tales you’ll have heard.
There was nothing unusual about the way I was taken, except that I was taken from my car rather than my bedroom. This was way back in the early 1960s, so I was still in my early twenties—it was seven years before I met Jenny—and I’d only just got my driving license after finishing teacher training and getting my first proper job teaching general science at a grammar school in Warminster. I didn’t really have any need to be out so late, but I liked driving in the dark, when the roads were quiet, so I was doing it for its own sake rather than having any pressing need to get from A to B. I don’t remember parking, but the car was safely parked when the aliens put me back into it, so I suppose they must have had some way of hypnotizing me into pulling over, putting the handbrake on and switching the engine off before I got out of the car and stepped into the tractor beam.
I don’t know how long I was on the ship, and I only have brief flashbacks to tell me what they did to me there. I remember them lifting my eyeballs out of their sockets, one by one, and placing them on my cheeks while they ran needles into my optic nerves and my cerebral cortex, but I suppose that’s the sort of thing that’s bound to stick in one’s memory, even when lesser events dissolve into forgetfulness. It sounds horrible, I know, but even though I wasn’t under a general anesthetic I couldn’t feel any pain or any horror; it’s only in retrospect that the thought of it makes me wince.
I doubt that I was on the operating table for much longer than a couple of hours, and I doubt that I spent more than twelve hours on the ship in total. When I woke up in my car I’d only been gone twenty minutes, so I naturally assumed, at first, that I’d fallen asleep at the wheel and dreamed the whole thing—it wasn’t until I started attending AlAbAn meetings that I realized how easy it is for the aliens to play tricks with time.
I drove home, at least half-convinced that I’d had a dream, perfectly prepared to forget the whole thing. Lots of people do, according to Walter—but they’re the ones who can just get on with their lives as if nothing at all had happened. I wasn’t able to do that. My life had changed completely, although it took a few days for me to realize that fact, and much longer than that for me to figure out why.
The next day, as soon as school was over, I drove to the central library in Salisbury. I went into the reference section, pulled half a dozen books off the shelves, sat down and began to read.
When I say “read”, though, I don’t actually mean read. What I actually did was turn the pages and look at each one in turn. I took time to do it—I actually scanned the pages rather than merely glancing at them, maybe for three or four seconds each—but I didn’t actually register anything consciously. I was just about aware of what it was that I was reading, in the sense that I knew whether it was algebra, poetry or some sportsman’s biography, but I only got the vaguest impression of the content. I was turning the pages too quickly; my brain couldn’t take in the information at that sort of pace. I couldn’t slow down, though, any more than I could stop. I didn’t leave the library until it closed at eight-thirty, by which time I was tired and starving.
I had to catch up with my marking the next day, but that only took an hour or so. Back in those days we didn’t have anything like the kind of paperwork to cope with that teachers have nowadays, so there were no lesson-plans to prepare or any nonsense of that sort. By five-thirty I was back in the library, and I didn’t leave until it closed. On Saturday I was in there all day, and I spent Sunday being very grateful that the library didn’t open on Sundays.
I knew something was wrong with me, of course, but I jumped to the conclusion that I had suddenly developed an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. I tried to book an appointment with a psychiatrist, but with school and my library work there wasn’t a suitable gap in my calendar, so I had to try to tackle it myself. I tried to stop myself going to the library. I tried to stop myself turning the pages at that hideously metronomic pace. I tried to pick out books that I wanted to read instead of the ones to which I was drawn. In every instance, I felt sick—not nauseous in the strict sense that I wanted to vomit, but just plain horrid. After a week or so of fighting it, I gave in. I was distressed and depressed, and my work at school was beginning to suffer, but I couldn’t let up. I was trapped.
And that’s when I met Amelia for the first time.
She wasn’t Amelia Rockham in those days; she was still Amelia Jennings. She was a little younger than me, but she’d qualified as a librarian at exactly the same time as I’d qualified as a teacher, and the junior position at the central library was her first job. I’d noticed her, of course, on my way in and out, and sometimes from the corner of my eye while I was working, and I’d seen the puzzled way she’d looked at me—which was understandable, given that I must have seemed a total madman. When she came over and sat down in the chair at seven forty-five on a quiet Monday evening I nearly broke out into a cold sweat for dread of what she might say.
“You seem to have quite a passion for print,” she observed.
I think I managed to mutter “Yes.” I was in the grip of a passion all right, but I wasn’t sure that print was the target of it, or that the passion was really mine in the strictest sense of the word.
“I won’t disturb you, then,” she said. “I just wanted to thank you.”
I couldn’t look up, but I managed to say “Why’s that?” without stammering.
“You always put the books back in the right places,” she said. “No matter how many you pile up when you come in, you always put them back exactly where they came from.”
“It’s no trouble,” I assured her.
“I thought at first you were studying to go on some TV quiz show,” she said, “or maybe that you were some kind of performer, like the Memory Man in that old Hitchcock film—The Thirty-Nine Steps, I think it was—but you’re a teacher, aren’t you, over at Warminster Grammar?”
“How did you know that?” I asked, still not looking up.
“Pupils get around,” she said. “Some of them even come into libraries occasionally. I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but it occurred to me that you might find this helpful, if your passion for print will allow it.”
She got up and went away then, but she left a little piece of paper on the table with an address, a day and a time written on it. I suppose I should have spoken to her again as I left but I was too embarrassed to do anything but nod. She smiled, but didn’t say anything.
There was no AlAbAn in those days, but there were meetings of self-styled UFO investigators—including, luckily for me, meetings that took place after eight o’clock in the evening. The piece of paper Amelia had given me was the time and place of such a meeting, hosted by someone named Walter Wainwright.
My first impulse was to feel insulted, and to avoid it like the plague—but in the end, I went to the meeting. Amelia was there, of course—and to tell you the truth, that was the only reason I stayed, and certainly the only reason I went back the following week. That was odd, in a way, because she didn’t say much more to me than hello on either occasion, and certainly didn’t give any outward sign that she was attracted to me. I suppose I was just being optimistic, or just appreciating the fact that I was somewhere other than the library or school. However paradoxical it might sound, I felt safe, simply because I was among strangers, with nothing at stake if they found out about my obsessive-compulsive disorder.
I didn’t feel safe at school. I’d begun to take my lunch-breaks in the school library, eating sandwiches while scanning pages, and rumors had begun to circulate there about my unnatural passion for print.
All the talk at the UFO investigation meetings was about sightings and newspaper reports—there was nothing about abductions in those days. I thought the people in the group were just exotic train-spotters. I didn’t really have an opinion on the stuff they were talking about, even though I was working in Warminster, not far from Cley Hill, where a lot of the sightings had been made. I didn’t really care one way or the other. All the speculation about what the riders of the alien spaceships might want with us, and why they didn’t just land their flying saucers outside the Houses of Parliament and ask to see Harold Macmillan, seemed like so much hot air—but it was comfortable hot air, and I was content to drink it in while hoping to catch Amelia’s eye, hoping that she might smile at me again, hoping that she might make the move that would take our relationship to some further stage.
I couldn’t make any sort of move myself, of course, because I was too embarrassed about being crazy. I was probably a fool to think that she might, given that every time she was on shift while I was in the library it must have seemed to her that I was deliberately ignoring her, putting her in second place behind my absurd passion for print
It was at the fifth investigators’ group meeting I attended that Amelia made a move of sorts, but it wasn’t at all what I’d expected. It was during a run-of-the-mill discussion about what the UFO people might want, when she suddenly piped up. She didn’t even glance in my direction, but I knew that she was really talking to me and not to the others.
“They’re studying us,” she said. “They’ve come here to find out what we’re all about. Maybe they’ll make contact eventually, and maybe they won’t, but they want to find out everything they can before they even think about doing that. They’re not going to be able to do it just by watching us, of course, or by monitoring our radio and TV broadcasts. They need more detail and more depth. They need to study our books, our libraries. They can’t just turn up in a library themselves, of course—but what they could do, if they were clever enough, would be to recruit humans so serve as their eyes, to do their reading for them.
“They’d need more than eyes, mind; they’d also need brains to interpret what the eyes see, though not necessarily consciously. They’d need to plant their bugs in the cerebral cortex as well as the optic nerves—but they wouldn’t need all that many surrogate observers, provided that they were willing to take their time with the project: two or three in Britain, maybe, the same in France and Germany, half a dozen in America, Russia and China. There are a lot of books in the world, but they wouldn’t have to read them all, and the more they read the more they’d be able to refine their search. A few dozen people working for a couple of years—five at the most—would enable them to learn pretty much all that they’d need to know about the human race.”
There were objections, of course, and questions, and further elaborations of the hypothesis—that was the kind of group it was—but I virtually stopped listening when Amelia finished speaking, because I knew that she was right. I knew that she’d guessed what had been done to me, just by watching me night after night, plowing through all those books without really being conscious of what I was reading. Because she was a member of Walter’s group as well as a librarian, she’d been able to deduce what had happened to me, and she’d wanted to let me know, to reassure me that I wasn’t mad. She’d even taken the trouble to try to reassure me that it would probably be a temporary thing, and that I’d eventually get to the end of it, and come out the other side.
She didn’t expect me to say anything to the meeting, and I didn’t. When I offered to drive her home afterwards she refused, explaining politely that one of the others always gave her a lift. She said she’d see me at the library the next day—as, of course, she did, although we weren’t able to have much of a conversation. I did try to talk to her after closing time, on that occasion. I even plucked up enough courage to ask her to go for a drink with me, but she had other things to do. I figured out pretty quickly that there wasn’t any chance of establishing an intimate relationship with her—not any longer, at any rate—but that only made it all the more remarkable that she’d reached out a helping hand, to let me know what I needed to know and to help me remember what I needed to remember.
That was when I accepted that it hadn’t been a dream, that night in the car, and that I really had been appropriated and adapted by the UFO people as an instrument for the absorption of human knowledge…and human folly too. I wasn’t just reading encyclopedias and textbooks, you see—I was reading all kinds of stuff. The only thing they let strictly alone was the fiction section. I read literary criticism and I read poetry, but I didn’t read novels of any sort, let alone science fiction. I guess the bugs they’d planted in two dozen exemplary human brains could tell them everything about human character they might have learned from Henry James and Virginia Woolf, and more. They certainly didn’t need any education when it came to aliens and spaceships.
I suppose I had fallen in love with Amelia, after a fashion, even though there wasn’t really any present in our relationship, let alone any future—but I was young, and those sorts of things pass, even for people who aren’t bogged down in obsessive-compulsive disorders. Nowadays, I suppose, if I’d turned up at her library every day except Sunday, and gone along to her UFO-group meetings once a fortnight, people might have accused me of stalking her, but we didn’t have stalkers back in the sixties, so nobody said anything derogatory about that particular aspect of my passion.
Once I knew what was happening to me, the reading business became a little less distressing, although it didn’t get any less burdensome. Although the aliens allowed me time to do my job, they weren’t overly concerned about how well I did it; although I scraped by, it was obvious to me, the head and all my colleagues, that scraping by was what I was doing.
I often wondered how much better I might have been as a teacher if I hadn’t labored under that crippling handicap during the crucial formative years of my career. Sometimes I think that I could have been really good, really successful—but I didn’t have the chance. I didn’t lose my job, but I didn’t make progress either. In the end, I had to leave the grammar because I knew that everyone else knew that I wasn’t as good as I ought to be, and wasn’t making any progress. I ended up in one of the new so-called comprehensives in Swindon, although I always thought of it was a jumped-up secondary modern, where second-rate teachers were perennially engaged in the hopeless task of trying to teach third-rate kids the exact extent of their hopelessness. The aliens had let me go by then, but…that’s not what concerns us here at AlAbAn, is it? What you want to hear is what I learned about the aliens while they had me under their spell: what I deduced about the nature and purpose of their enquiry.
First of all, I think I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that they didn’t see eye to eye with one another. They were in competition, even conflict. I could tell, by the way they made me take the books off the shelves and put them in order for reading, that I was following several different agendas simultaneously, all of them bidding for priority within the limited time available. I must have been like the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, with dozens of different astronomers trying to book time on me, wanting to point me in a hundred different directions to study different phenomena—pulsars, quasars, supernovas and so on. It wasn’t just the fact that there were different academic specialists among the alien scientists, but that the different specialists all thought that their route to understanding was the best one and deserved greater priority. You get the same thing in schools, where teachers in different subjects each think that their own subject gives a special insight into the working of the universe or the human mind—at least, you get that in grammar schools, where the teachers actually pretend to care.…
